Will Wilson

Recent Articles

• CSI, Stand Aside: DNA Databases Raise Alarms
• Jun 1, 2010
• State legislators are taking a new interest in DNA databases and in whether the evidence stored in them skirts rules about privacy and security.

• Lone Star Contract Less
• May 1, 2010
• A privatization program unravels in its first year and raises questions about how it could go so far south so fast.

• Hold That Hire
• Jun 30, 2009
• "It's not an easy job being a jailer," says Captain Hunter Petray, who works in the sheriff's office in Benton County, Arkansas. Few would dispute...

• Not a Pretty Picture
• May 4, 2009
• From Google, state-by-state and county-by-county graphs of unemployment figures for easy comparison. Soon, we'll be able to do this with more data. Hat tip: ...

• Finally, Data We Can Use: Per Capita Beer Brewing by State
• Apr 21, 2009
• Here's a map, courtesy of SloshSpot, of brewery density per capita in these United States: As a native Montanan, I'm not surprised we'...

• The Pain of Cutting Payroll
• Mar 31, 2009
• Whacked by budget deficits and with no end to sluggish economies in sight, states, cities and counties have been forced to make the hardest cuts...

• Florida Workforce and the Budget Crisis of 2009
• Mar 25, 2009
• The Florida Legislature is considering cutting every state worker's salary by 5%. Let's put that in some context. In the 2008 Grading the States, here'...

• If You're A Happy State And You Know It...
• Mar 12, 2009
• Utah is the happiest state;  West Virginia the least. That's according to a Gallup self-reporting happiness survey. Broadly speaking, there seems to be a &...

• That Pesky 17th Amendment
• Feb 10, 2009
• Some state budget stabilization funds wound up on the stimulus cutting room floor yesterday. Matthew Yglesias wonders why seemingly strong political constituencies like state-level politicians ...

• Watch That Stimulus
• Feb 9, 2009
• Stimulus Watch looks like a website that probably should have been around long before the stimulus package: a thumbnail glance at all of the "...

• Is Government Technology Intentionally Frustrating?
• Jan 26, 2009
• Apropos of the Obama staff's rude tech awakening in the White House, Megan McArdle asks, "Why is government IT so awful?" And ...

• Start-Up Government
• Jan 5, 2009
• Today's Washington Post has a nice story on DC chief technology officer Vivek Kundra. The opening of the article especially underscores how Kundra not ...
• 1 Comments

• Second Spin
• Dec 31, 2008
• When Steve Gendler retired 16 years ago from a career as an Arizona law enforcement officer, he figured he'd spend a lot of his time doing...

• Will the Census Save the GOP?
• Dec 22, 2008
• Recent thrashings at the ballot box have many Republicans as well as other political commentators wondering about the health of the party. Has the party ...
• 2 Comments

• The Yankees and the Mayor's Office
• Dec 18, 2008
• When the stories began leaking out about New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office pressuring the Yankees for a luxury suite in the new ...